Hill

What an incredible read. This story is loosely based on facts about slavery in the 16th century and revolves around Aminata who is stolen from her village at the age of 11 and forced to travel months on foot to the ocean and taken over to America to work in an Indigo farm.

This reads like a biography, parts of it feel real and you want to save Aminata from the perils of her life. Although, she goes through many distressing situations she is strong and helps everyone around her and becomes an enigma of sorts, intriguing all the white folk around her (a smart black woman? never!).

I found this hard to get into initially, maybe because of the age of the character and the discussion of talk in her village but as I read more and more I wanted to know what happened to Aminata and how she had fared through her incredible journey.

Also, generally I don’t like male authors writing female characters, they never seem to do it justice but Hill definitely made me forget about him and just focus on the character. Brilliant work.

This makes you think about slavery in our history and how people justify stealing people from their homes to be sold on. It is just an ugly trade and sad to know it still goes on, if not highly publicised.